Feb 22, 2009

Today, we met with Greg who will be our new project corrdinator starting after break. We presented to him what we have been doing and where we are now in the process, and allowed him to ask us any questions he had for us. After sharing our thoughts an hearing his we feel like he could definately help us move in the right direction to making the video.

Well, it's been a while......February 15

We have made a considerable amount of progress since September. We decided to split the video into different segments: formation of a star, interstellardust, black holes, stars and galaxies, and detectors. For each part we have written scipts to go along with the pictures we want to see in thevideo. Having written the scripts we then had to bring them to James to get them looked over. While meeting with him we dicussed the weak parts of our scripts and how they could be made better in order to maximize the amount ot knowledge the audience is able to take away. After everone met with him, we all came together to talk about what we had learned from James and exactly what, if anything, needed to be changed in each of our scripts. Once they were to a point where they were well written and ready to go, we recorded our scripts in their full entirety and played them along with a powerpoint fit for the cube. While doing this we were able to hear the parts of our scripts that might not work and see them visually alongsidethe pictures of what we hope to see in our final animation. This allowed us to focus in on the parts that didnt work and build on them to get them up to the standards we wanted to meet. Since then we have all changed our scripts numerous times in order to make them stronger, and are now to a point where they are ready to get looked over for scientific correctness.
Aside from scripts we have made great progress in learning the programming also. At the start we were striving to learn luster and flash, hoping that these programs would bring success in the end, but we soon found out that they were going to take a lot longer then expected, and wouldnt work for what we wanted to use them for. Realizing this we quickly made a group decision to switch to Celestia which would allow us to make our video in an efficient way. Having made this decision we all downloaded Celestia on our own time and have began learning the sripting language and how to work the program. Though we might have to make some objects along the way, Celestia has everything already in it and is pretty much ready for us to put ou scripting in and get our video going. Its taken us a while to get to where we are now, but we've definately made great progress and its clear in our work.